The HP PageWide Enterprise Color 556dn is a fast inkjet printer that produces laser-quality text and terrific-looking graphics at very low costs for its class.

HP's PageWide Pro and PageWide Enterprise inkjet printers are among the best laser alternatives available. The PageWide Enterprise Color 556dn ($749.99) is essentially the same machine as HP's slightly less expensive ($699.99) Editors' Choice PageWide Pro 552dw, with a few differences in features. Like the 552dw, the 556dn is fast and prints well, and it's highly expandable. Unlike the 552dw, however, the 556dn has some of the lowest running costs in the business. That's enough for it to nudge the 552dw out as our Editors' Choice for medium-to-heavy-duty standalone printers for micro and small offices.

Design and Features

At 16.5 by 20.9 by 16 inches (HWD) and weighing in at 37 pounds, the 556dn is the same size and weight as the 552dw. In size, it's comparable to a similarly equipped standalone color laser printers, though the PageWide machine is lighter than most laser printers. Canon's Color ImageClass LBP712Cdn, for instance, measures 15.3 by 18.1 by 18.3 inches, but at 77.2 pounds, it weighs more than twice as much as the 556dn.

Also like the 552dw, the 556dn holds up to 550 sheets of paper (legal-size or smaller), divided between a 500-sheet cassette and a 50-sheet multipurpose tray. If you need more than that, options abound, including a second 500-sheet paper drawer ($299) or a printer stand and three additional 500-sheet cassettes ($1,199), for a total of 2,050 sheets. (The stand and three-tray option lists for $400 more than the same option for the 552dw, but the former does come with three drawers instead of two. And the standalone second paper drawer costs $100 more.) The 556dn's maximum monthly duty cycle is 80,000 pages, with a recommended volume of 2,000 to 7,500 pages.

Where the 556dn falls short of the 552dw is connectivity features. You can only connect to a PC via Ethernet or USB. Unlike the 552dw (but as with many laser machines), the 556dn comes without either Wi-Fi, wireless direct (HP's Wi-Fi Direct equivalent), or near-field communications (NFC), though you can add all three with HP's JetDirect 3000w NFC/Wireless Accessory ($59). And you still get strong mobile connectivity through HP's ePrint app and a few other HP mobile apps, as well as Google Cloud Print v2, Apple AirPrint, and Mopria.

Configuration and walk-up (PC-free) tasks, such as printing from the cloud or a USB thumb drive, are handled from a 4.3-inch touch screen that comprises the entire control panel. It has a different layout from those you'll find on consumer- and small-business-oriented printers from HP and other vendors, using a list of tasks rather than Windows-like labeled icons, but I got used to it after a while.

Print Speed

HP's PageWide machines behave like laser printers in that the print heads consist of an array of ink nozzles that span the page instead of a carriage moving back and forth, spraying ink, printing small sections at a time. Similar to their laser counterparts, PageWide machines image the entire page in memory before sending it beneath the nozzle array in one pass, allowing for much faster print times than you get from traditional inkjet printers.

Since PC Labs tested the PageWide Pro 552dw prior to developing our current benchmark regimen, we can't compare its performance stats against the 556dn's directly. With that in mind, both machines are rated at 50 pages per minute (ppm) in Standard mode and 75ppm in Draft mode. Using our Core i5 testbed PC running Windows 10, I tested it in Standard mode, with impressive results.

The 556dn printed our lightly formatted Microsoft Word text file at 53.2ppm—3.2ppm faster than the printer's rating, and faster than nearly every other printer we've reviewed using our new test documents. Only the Dell Smart Printer S5830dn, with a speed of 62.2ppm, printed our test text document faster. When we added our Excel, PowerPoint, and Acrobat PDF files containing graphics and images to the mix, the 556dn's print speed plummeted to 18.9ppm. But such a drop is not unusual—the S5830dn fell from 62.2ppm to 23.8ppm on this portion of the test.

Finally, HP rates this printer's first-page-out time at 7.1 seconds. After averaging several attempts, we came up with 14 seconds. Overall, first-page-out times were erratic, with a few upwards of 20 seconds. On only one test did we see a time near HP's rating (7.7 seconds), and without that result the first-page-out time would have been even higher.

Output Quality

PageWide nozzle arrays are not only faster than traditional inkjet print heads, but they contain smaller, tightly positioned nozzles that produce superb text and business graphics. In addition, inkjet printers churn out better-looking photos than most laser printers. As with the PageWide Pro 552dw and HP's other PageWide models (including the PageWide brand's OfficeJet Pro X predecessors), we have no real complaints about the 556dn's print quality. Photographs came out somewhat lifeless and dull on our high-quality document paper, but looked much better when we switched to premium photo stock. Other than that, text in all but the smallest fonts (5 points) looked very near laser quality, highly legible and suitable for all business applications (except, perhaps, rendering fine print).

Our PowerPoint slides and Excel graphics came out better than average, too, with consistent fills and smooth gradients; even our darkest and most difficult-to-reproduce gradients printed without noticeable banding or other ink distribution flaws. We should point out, though, that like all laser (and PageWide) printers, this one cannot print ("bleed") to the edge of the paper. Every page, even small (say, 4-by-6-inch) photos, must contain a small margin on all four sides, making PageWide machines the only inkjet printers we know of that can't print bleeds. Some documents, and especially photos, don't look properly "finished" with white (paper) margins all the way around the content.

Running Costs

HP sells ink cartridges for the 556dn in three different yield sizes. The highest-yield cartridges are rated at 20,000 monochrome pages and 16,000 color pages. When you buy them on HP's website, the cost per page is 0.8 cent for monochrome pages and 5 cents for color pages. These running costs are highly competitive. The black-and-white cost per page, for example, is half a cent lower than the 552dw's 1.3 cents, and the running costs of the aforementioned Canon LBP712Cdn color laser printer are 1.7 cents for monochrome pages and a whopping 10.4 cents for color. Unfortunately, these costs are typical for laser printers in this class, providing yet another reason the 556dn makes an excellent alternative.

Conclusion

The HP PageWide Enterprise Color 556dn prints well, fast, and inexpensively, and has a wealth of expansion options. Unfortunately, some of these, especially with regard to connectivity, cost extra compared with the similarly configured 552dw, and the expansion drawers and stand are significantly more expensive. Even so, if you print thousands of pages each month, the 556dn's low running costs make it a better value. Say, for instance, you print 10,000 pages each month. At 0.5 cent less per page, the Enterprise version will save you $600 per year over the PageWide Pro iteration. That's reason enough for it to be our top pick for medium-to-heavy-duty standalone printers for micro and small offices.

William Harrel has been writing about computer technology for more than 25 years. He has authored or coauthored 20 books—including titles in the popular "Bible," "Secrets," and "For Dummies" series—on digital design (or desktop publishing) software applications, such as Acrobat, Photoshop, and QuarkXPress. His latest title is HTML, CSS, and JavaScript Mobile Development for Dummies (a handbook for creating websites for smartphones and tablets), and he is a Contributing Editor at PCMag.com's sister site, Computer Shopper.
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